


blessed be the lord my rock who trains my hands for war

by orphan_account



Category: Far Cry 4
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-16 02:47:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3471497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the moment Sabal lays eyes on Mohan’s son, he knows two things. The first is that he needs Ajay Ghale on his side; the second is that he will do anything to keep him there.</p>
<p>Ajay is alone in unfamiliar territory, but he’s not stupid, and he knows there’s more than one way to get what he wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

Sabal introduces him to Banapur with the fierce pride of a man who’s worked hard and _suffered_ for his home. Ajay only half-listens, finds his eyes drawn ever upwards, past the thatched roofs of the village to the mountains crowding its horizon, the ice-bright immensity of them, their palpable cold.

  


His attention snaps back when he hears a voice, cautious and close-by, ask, “Who is this?” The  voice belongs to a woman, tall and straight-backed, her shoulders squared. She has the bearing of a woman accustomed to standing her ground, and Ajay wonders who she is. He finds his curiosity quickly forgotten, though, when she asks after Darpan. The guilt he feels is immediate and he’s framing an apology, _I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I didn’t want this,_ when Sabal rests a reassuring hand on the back of his elbow, silencing him.

  


“He didn’t make it,” Sabal replies simply, a harsh fact of a harsh life, and before the woman on the stairs can speak, he goes on, seeming more concerned about her reaction to what he says next than the fact that one of her soldiers—potentially one of her _friends_ —is dead. “This is Ajay Ghale. Mohan’s son.”

  


Ajay doesn’t know what response he was expecting, but what he gets is speechless disgust, like she’s not sure which one of them she’s going to backhand first. Her eyes flicker to him, briefly, and then she rounds on Sabal with her anger just barely contained.

  


“Let me understand. Darpan’s dead, and you brought me this?”

  


“I’m not involved in… whatever this is,” Ajay interjects swiftly, a vain effort to defuse the situation. There is peace in this place, just beneath the surface, and he thinks if he closes his eyes he might be able to _feel_ it, if only there would come a moment of silence between firefight and poisonous hostility. “I’m just looking for Lakshmana.”

  


She levels him with a gaze like steel, like ice, and shakes her head. For a second, she looks, inexplicably, disappointed, and when she speaks—to Sabal, not to Ajay—her voice is cold. “We’re in the middle of a fucking war. We don’t have time for tourists.”

  


“What was I supposed to do? Just leave him there?” Sabal demands as she stalks off like some predatory thing denied a meal, and Ajay, rubbing the back of his neck, wishes that he would just let it slide. He can feel curious eyes on him and their scrutiny makes his skin crawl. He’s relieved past telling when Sabal sighs, rolls his eyes, and says, “I’m sorry, brother. Amita’s a little touchy. I’ll talk to her. As for Lakshmana, it sounds like it could be a temple, or shrine… but if that’s the case, it’s in the north. The north is enemy territory, and we can’t get you there, not yet.”

  


There passes a brief moment, so transitory he’ll forget it later, when Ajay feels simmering anger in the pit of his belly, when a single black thought flashes into his consciousness like lightning, _Pagan could have got me there_.

  


“Go and clear your head,” Sabal suggests, looking out over Banapur, at those same mountains that Ajay can’t stop staring at. “Come and find me when you’re ready.”

  


“Sure,” he agrees, readily enough... but he’s been running on adrenaline since the checkpoint, since it all went explosively out of control, since _I’d know those eyes anywhere,_ so after he watches Sabal go and stands for an uncertain moment looking from building to building, then back up at the jagged skyline. When he finally _does_ move, all he manages is to just ease himself down to a nearby bench that’s nearly level with the ground, close his eyes, and let out a long, exhausted groan as aching waves of pain roll through him until all his nerves are humming with it.

  


After the pain, when it’s settled in, seeped into the marrow of his bones like an unwelcome guest, there comes the sick realisation that he _killed_ people today, and his eyes snap open, wild, like he’s woken from a nightmare.

  


For a long time all he can do is stare in mute horror at the blood streaking his forearms, with his heart hammering too fast in his chest, in his ears. His thoughts swarm like bees, angry, and chief amongst them is the fear that he can’t go home now, can’t go back to America with this weighing on him. They’ll lock him up, they’ll catch him at the airport and they’ll _smell_ his rotten conscience and they’ll know, they’ll know, they’ll know—

  


A child’s voice brings him briefly up out of the haze of his thoughts, asking, “Are you alright?”

  


He remembers her from before, minutes ago, or hours, a nameless girl standing a step behind Amita, curious, listening intently.

  


“Bhadra!” A voice—Amita’s?—calls, sharp, angry, and the girl turns. He tries to follow her line of vision but his gaze drops again to all that blood, speckling his clothes like paint, smudged across his arms, probably on his face, too, in his hair. He doesn’t hear Bhadra’s soft murmur, _We should get Sabal_ , doesn’t see the grudging concern on Amita’s face when she agrees. All he sees is the faceless, nameless dead, unmourned in the mountains, not dead like the soldier Pagan stabbed, not dead like Darpan with the life electrocuted out of him, but dead because of him, because he killed them, because he _chose_ to kill them.

  


The light is fading and the cold drawing in when Sabal finds him, kneels in the dirt at his feet, and takes his hands.

  


“I’m sorry, brother,” he sighs, peeling back Ajay’s gloves and setting them down beside the plastic bucket of well-water he brought with him. Ajay draws a breath in sharp through his teeth at colour of his hands, red, red, _red_ where the blood has soaked through. “When you’ve lived like this for so long, it’s all too easy to forget how hard your first kill can be.”

  


The water’s so cold that it _hurts_ , but Sabal, warm and firm and gentle, washes the blood away with such quiet, practised efficiency that he can almost ignore the ache of it, the way his fingers, chilled raw and pink, seize and stiffen into claws. The cold bothers him far less than the low, hissing voice at the back of his head, the one calling him _terrorist_ , calling him _murderer_ , the one that sounds like his mother.

  


When his hands are clean, Sabal holds them in his own a while longer, easing the warmth back into them with slow, circular movements of his fingers. Ajay finds the touch comforting, distracting enough to calm him down, to ease him away from the terror in his head and let it dissipate, slow but sure, in the dying light.

  


“Thanks, Sabal,” he says at length. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  


Sabal looks up at him and smiles, just a little, and Ajay is struck by his eyes, the colour of them, smudged dark with kohl but _bright_ , all green and gold like light through leaves.

  


“Perhaps not, but I know that look,” he says, shaking his head. “I’ve seen it a hundred times before, on a hundred different faces. This lifestyle, the Golden Path… it takes getting used to. You’d have sat here all night in shock if Bhadra hadn’t found you.”

  


“I guess. I don’t even know how many people we killed today. How many _I_ killed.” He feels small and wretched, like a child, and he wants desperately for Sabal to say something that will set his mind at ease, not from the fear but from the guilt, to say _it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay_ until he believes it.

  


“Only a handful. The avalanche took care of the rest,” he shrugs, and Ajay almost laughs. There will come a day when he stops counting the dead, when he can set a man on fire and listen to the hideous agony of his death without a second thought. He will be stone by the end of this and some part of him, down deep, long-buried, knows it, knows he was _born_ for this — but now, right now, he’s sick to his stomach with the weight of what he’s done, and _only a handful_ is not the comfort he needs.

  


Sabal sees all that fear and doubt, leans in close and tightens his grip on Ajay’s hands. “What you must understand, Ajay, is that it was them or us. You killed them, yes, but they’d have done the same to you, given the chance. Killing will never come naturally to you. That’s simply not the kind of man that you are. It’s not the kind of man that your father was. But it _does_ get easier, and those men deserved to die.”

  


“That’s not the point. Murder is murder. Doesn’t matter if they deserve it.”

  


“Is it murder to put down a rabid dog? That’s all they are, Ajay. They do not kill out of necessity, they do it for pleasure, or because Pagan tells them to. The Golden Path is nothing like them. _You_ are nothing like them.” These are the words Ajay needs to hear. They’ll run through his head like a refrain with every bullet fired, every arrow loosed, every lurid torrent of arterial blood spilled bright and warm across his hands—

  


_You are nothing like them_.

  


Sabal, perhaps sensing his success, rises, claps him on the shoulder. “Get some rest, brother. There’s work to be done.”

  


Ajay doesn’t sleep well. But he sleeps, and when the morning comes he rises with it, rises ready.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

The second night is easier than the first. He wakes once, wet with sweat and sure he’s screamed, but after that, he sleeps deep, and dreams of the wolves. Outside Kanan’s farm, he shot them and they died and that was all; in the dream, he shoots them down and they die in great burst of smoke, pale clouds of it streaked with dream-bright colour. It smells of incense, and when it clears he sees the bodies not of wolves but of men, with blood at their throats and fear gone glassy in their dead staring eyes. The sight of them sends a bright, stark thrill of power through him, and come morning, he only remembers that the dream was a good one.

 

In the days that follow, Sabal sets him to work silencing the bell towers that Pagan repurposed into mindless propaganda machines. “They were sacred once,” he says, and the grief in him runs so deep and profound that Ajay feels his heart like a clenched fist constrict with the need to make things right.

 

There are times, climbing those towers, when he slips, when he miscalculates and finds himself hanging by his fingertips from some rotten, creaking ledge, with nothing but thirty feet of open air between himself and the ground, with his arms shaking and all the muscles in his shoulders screaming, and his mind so clouded by the fear of falling that all he can think is _I can’t I can’t I can’t—_ and every time,  _every_ time, it’s the dim fading memory of that terrible sadness that lends him the desperate strength to save himself.

 

The view from the top is worth the hardship, strikes him speechless, chases away the clinging residues of fear and whispers  _welcome home_  to his tired, aching bones. All the eddying mist in the river valley gives way to trees in verdant shades of green and ochre, and then the mountains, always the mountains, standing sentinel at the edges of his vision, white and brooding, haloed by streamers of cloud and windblown snow. Some nights back in the States he’d wake from dreams of peaks like these, of Everest and Makalu and Lhotse, with bone-deep yearning in his chest like heartbreak; he’s content here, in the clear silent air with the wind pulling at his clothes and the blue arching roof of the world in touching distance, more at home than he ever was in California.

 

He takes to sleeping up in the dust and cold of the bell tower looking down on Banapur. There’s a quiet solace in looking down on the rooftops gone fire-red and gold in the blazing light of sunset, and instead of dwelling on troubling thoughts, he leans on the guardrail and watches twilight creep slow and blue and cool across the hills, and when the mountains have faded to inky silhouettes he lights a lamp and sits watching moths bounce off the glass, breathes in the smoke and smell of kerosene until sleep comes.

 

It doesn’t feel like the work of a revolutionary or a terrorist; it just feels good. It feels  _right_ , fills him with warmth and optimism, and for a little while he forgets all the miles and adversity between these moments of brightness and Lakshmana, hidden somewhere in the unattainable north.

 

The climbing comes naturally to him, one step at a time and  _don’t look down_ , but Sabal makes him promise every time that he won’t fall, as if a promise will catch him if he loses his footing.

 

He  _does_  fall, once. It’s the third bell tower he’s scaled and maybe that familiarity makes him arrogant, maybe it makes him forget the soldier back in Banapur, the one who fell, all that blood, all that screaming…

 

The floorboards, rotten and long-disused, groan underfoot as they strain under his weight, but the sound barely registers, and when they give out, when he goes down in a shower of wet, splintered wood, arms pinwheeling in a desperate scramble for something to break his fall, he’s too surprised to even scream. He smashes through a crossbeam on the way down, and it sends a shock of pain knifing through him, so bright and sharp and sudden that he  _does_ scream _—_ and then he hits the ground, and all the air punches out of his lungs, and he lies there stunned on his back with blood in his mouth and  _pain pain pain_ throbbing everywhere all at once… but it’s over, and he’s alive.

 

When he comes limping back to Banapur, with splinters and friction burns and all the skin grazed from his shoulder-blades where he hit the ground, Sabal looks at him with such concern that Ajay can’t hold his gaze without feeling an absurd twinge of guilt.

 

“You’re hurt.”

 

“No, it’s nothing _—_ ” he begins to protest, but Sabal shakes his head to interrupt, rests a hand on the back of Ajay’s neck and guides him into the warm golden light of a nearby building, sits him down, asks what happened, sighs hard through his nose and shakes his head when Ajay says, like a man confessing guilt, “I fell.”

 

“You remember?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Good _._ Let me see your eyes.” He tucks two fingers under Ajay’s chin and lifts his face to the light, looks for a long time at both of his eyes, ghosts his thumb feather-light along Ajay’s jawline before he lets go, a gesture that feels intimate and sends heat and colour creeping across his cheeks. “No headache? You’re not confused? Concussion isn’t difficult to treat, but…”

 

“No. No, I’m fine.”

 

Sabal tends to him in silence thereafter. His hands are patient and gentle, but there is unspoken tension heavy in the air between them, and Ajay flushes again with guilt when he shrugs his shirt off and Sabal grimaces at the all the black bruises like thunderheads darkening his ribs, his arm, his hips and shoulders.

 

“I can’t do anything for the bruising, brother,” he says at last, but he cleans the dirt from all the broken skin across Ajay’s back (and Ajay hisses while he’s doing it and shies away and curses), and once he’s satisfied that the Son of Mohan isn’t going to drop dead from some catastrophic internal haemorrhage, Sabal sits beside him and sighs again and traces the back of his fingers down all those aching bruises, and Ajay, head bowed, is very aware of how close they are, how  _warm_  Sabal is, how the smell of him is all sweat and smoke and sandalwood.

 

He pulls in a deep breath, watches blood beading on his palms and fingers where the splinters came out, tries very hard to stop shivering.

 

“You promised me you wouldn’t fall,” Sabal says, and Ajay closes his eyes and nods.

 

“I know.” He murmurs it in a small, whispered voice, like an apology, eyes downcast—but when he glances up sidelong at Sabal, he sees him dissatisfied, like he’s waiting for something better, so he straightens his back and says again, louder, firmer, “ _I know_. I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful next time.”

 

He  _is_  more careful, and within two days he’s reclaimed three more towers for the Golden Path, traced patterns with his fingertips through the years of dust gathered on all those intricately inscribed bells hanging forgotten in their belfries, made wordless promises to see them all restored. The old structures creak and they groan, and the floor in places is like sponge, weak and waterlogged—but he  _listens_ , and he takes his time, and he doesn’t fall again.

 

The work is rewarding and it fills him with purpose, and for a little while, he relaxes.

 

Kyrat allows him a week of peace before it shows its teeth.

 

It wakes him with the rattle of gunfire in the stark grey hour before dawn, somewhere in the west, somewhere still dark and sleeping under fading stars—and even in the few delirious, half-waking seconds before the call to arms goes out over the radio, he knows it’s Banapur, and he’s  _angry_. The last clinging residue of dreamless sleep washes from him like mist fleeing the sun, and he’s cold and clear in its absence, and he’s  _aware_ , and he’s ready.

 

He doesn’t think twice when Sabal asks for fighters, doesn’t think  _I’m no soldier_ , doesn’t hesitate; he falls on them like a thing starved, and flushes them from the burning streets with the anger in him so huge and black and terrible that he could scream for it. He’s precise, methodical, deadly; half of them die before they even know he’s among them, and those who remain are  _afraid_ of him, of this demon come unflinching and unscathed through gunfire and incendiaries.

 

They flee, in the end, and as he watches them go, with all his colours over-saturated and his blood rushing too loud in his ears, he feels the savage, screaming need to give chase, to run them down like  _dogs_  and show them what revenge looks like.

 

There’s something low and creeping and reptilian about that desire, and later, watching Golden Path soldiers clear the corpses from the outpost he reclaimed in their name, he’ll be afraid to confront it. He’ll sneak and skirt around it, wonder not what he might’ve done but what might’ve happened to Bhadra if not for Sabal’s voice cutting clear and firm through the haze, urging him to find her.

 

He thinks that she’d be dead— _knows_  it—and that’s not an easy thought to face (because God,she’s so young and she’s so  _bright_ , so miraculously untouched by all the bloodshed and suffering she was born into) but he clings to it, considers its every angle in minute detail, remembers all those bodies in the dirt and imagines her among them, because it’s an easier thing by far than remembering the animal urge to  _kill_  that ran like wildfire through his head and his heart in those few stricken moments in Banapur.

 

Come nightfall, there are plenty of other troubling thoughts to distract him, lying awake not in his nest in the bell tower but in the stuffy warmth of the outpost’s safehouse, too low, too loud.

 

He  _wants_ to remember the fierce, ardent gratitude shining like sunlight from Bhadra’s smile when she threw her arms around him for saving her; he wants to remember the comfort of Sabal’s arm around his waist, supporting him, ready to catch him if he falls; he wants to remember Amita with her arms encircling Bhadra like something heavenly sent to protect her—and he does, he  _does_ remember those things, but everything comes back as if by some inexorable magnetism to the cold indifference on Sabal’s face when he says, “The people need to see her. It’ll comfort them.” He says it without even lookingat Bhadra, says it to Amita like he’s talking not about a frightened little girl but a trinket to be held up to the light and admired,  _look, no cracks._

 

Ajay remembers watching her through weeping, smoke-sore eyes, watching her plead wordlessly with her hands and her eyes, clinging to Amita, blinking back tears,  _no, I don’t want to, please don’t let him make me_. He remembers being angry, being too weak to protest, being glad when Amita, all simmering, slow-burning fury, says, “She’s just a  _child_ , Sabal, and she’s terrified.”

 

He’s angry for a long time, and all the killing is easier for it, and he’s angry about that as well.

 

The Golden Path has already shaped Bhadra into something gaudy for the people; Ajay lies awake most night wondering what Sabal means to shape  _him_ into.

 


End file.
